David Wayne Thomas has written a closely argued and very interesting book that links aesthetic culture and the liberal imagination in the Victorian period. In the past thirty years, literary studies in particular have been weakened by the assimilation of theoretical discourses that treat aesthetic concerns as mere disguises for political values. Under the same absurd premises that have made the choice of, say, what supermarket one goes to a political decision masquerading as a consumer decision, the aesthetic gets dismissed as a charade. Thomas notes that some extremely tentative movements in the opposite direction have been made of late. He regards these as significant, but he believes that any adequate rehabilitation of the aesthetic, at least with respect to Victorian culture, must include a reassessment of the character of modern liberal culture. One would assume—given this project—that Thomas would initiate his reassessment with a discussion of a text like Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind or, perhaps, with the key triumvirate of Carlyle, Mill, and Arnold. It is a distinctive feature of Cultivating Victorians that it lays out its project by exploring “a rather idiosyncratic array of [aesthetic] cases” in the nineteenth century (xi). Thus Schiller is never mentioned, Carlyle gets a couple of paragraphs, Mill gets few pages, and Arnold, who wrote more influentially about Victorian liberal culture than any of his contemporaries and who also shaped both his poetry and prose as a quest for the nature of the aesthetic, is reduced to a caricature whom we observe through the watery musings of a third-rate critic, W. J. Courthope.

Cultivating Victorians deals, in the interest of greater concreteness, with the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thomas puts a particular stress on the term “cultivation”: “Concerning both liberal culture and aestheticism, scholarly debates in recent decades have turned on the balance we should strike in understanding persons and classes as cultivating or as cultivated, as subjects or objects of cultivation” (x). This focus locates the link between the liberal and the aesthetic in the question of agency. The study begins, then, with an analysis, vaguely historical in nature, of “liberal culture's evolving discourse of autonomy and self-culture” (40) and its fundamental interest in exploring the “many-sidedness” of both life and art. Thomas is interested in how these emphases inevitably generated a complexly deployed rhetoric of agency in the aesthetic culture of the period.

Thomas devotes a chapter to Ruskin's study of Venice. The chapter astutely assesses the tensions, even contradictions, that appear in Ruskin's remarkable portrayal of the city and especially the Ducal Palace. On the one hand, Ruskin projects an understanding of the aesthetic object as inherently informed by universal aesthetic laws and, on the other, turns his discussions into “staging points for a more individualized free expression.” Inevitably, then, Ruskin's very rhetoric demonstrates “a conflicted sense of modern subjectivity and liberal agency” (51). Thomas's reading of Ruskin's chapter on the Ducal Palace throws light on the general thesis of his book. Contradiction in Ruskin emerges, appealingly, as a sign of the vitality of his thinking. The appeal is rooted in “our interest in a specific ideal of agency, understood as individual vitality gratified in its will by managing somehow [to control] the competing mandates and influences that inform that will” (78).

One of the best chapters in the book is a provocative playing off of D. G. Rossetti's compulsive replications of his work, a quality so strangely caught by his sister's sonnet “In an Artist's Studio,” with the historical replication in the 1887 Manchester Exhibition of “Old Manchester and Salford.” The replica, which, in effect, fabricated a preindustrial version of the city within its contemporary reality, had a special purpose. “Old Manchester and Salford was not merely a scene of innocently nostalgic recuperation but an attempt actively to define for the city a sense, in the here and now, of its authentic character as a place to be from” (147). Both pillars of the chapter's subject rest on impressive research. From their juxtaposition, Thomas shows that “Rossetti's replicas indicated to him both his constraint and his creative free agency; the Manchester replica intimated both an authenticating deep history and a thoroughgoing, even absolute, currency. In each case, the interested individuals had before them not merely images of themselves but images of their agency as a tangled and even contradictory construct” (154). The crucial point of the juxtaposition is what happens when it is subjected to the view of aesthetic agency as defined by poststructuralism. The canons of poststructuralism would insist that there is very little ground for arguing, say, that Rossetti's replications can be discerned as aesthetic achievements while the city replicas exhibit bourgeois bad faith. But Thomas argues forcefully that a heroic aesthetic agency is evident in Rossetti's struggles that is unavailable in the Manchester replications.

The book's concluding chapter deals with Oscar Wilde's “aesthetic agency.” Wilde's aesthetic agency hinges on the figure of paradox, his speciality. Thomas balances the discussion on a remark in De Profundis that works, more or less, as a condensed statement of the problematic connections of aesthetics and liberal agency mapped in Cultivating Victorians: “To be entirely free, and at the same time, entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realize every moment.” Thomas wants to argue that we can take such an utterance as marking a persuasive conception of agency. “Can one actually inhabit, rather than merely gesture at, such a paradoxical positionality?” The answer is that by adopting such a “positionality” one can “enter fully into the characteristic complexity of the liberal self-conception, understood as an ongoing effort to reconcile or balance opposing claims about the sources of agency” (165–66). One had hoped for something more compelling from a chapter that includes supple critical analysis of texts such as “The Portrait of Mr W. H.” and Dorian Gray. But Thomas's tendency throughout the book is to turn from the gratifyingly supple to the compulsively subtle. Thus, the chapter inserts between its consideration of these texts a roundabout discussion of Louis Althusser and “the interpellative aesthetic.” The Wilde chapter is meant to serve as the conclusion not only of the book but also of the argument it develops. But the chapter does not effectively serve the latter purpose. An actual concluding and summary chapter is just what this original and often fascinating study needs.